Present Tense: Photographs by JoAnn Verburg

Through such formal devices as series and multipanel works, JoAnn Verburg invigorates some of photographyâs common themes â the portrait, the landscape, the domestic view. Some of her work catches viewers off guard, leaving them unsure where they stand in relationship to the scene being shown; others play with the passage of time, offering narratives that play out in either space or time, or both, or neither. The intimate spaces of personal life are another of her ongoing themes, as shown in a series featuring her husband, the poet Jim Moore, reading newspapers or books, or sleeping. The unguarded intimacy of the image strikes one note here; the tension and reality of the current events featured on that dayâs newspaper strikes another, reaching out of the work into the world, expanding photographyâs space even further. Whether taking pictures of artists, swimmers, trees or pyramids constructed from sand,Verburg deftly pushes at the boundaries of the representation of time and space.